The game we played made no sense, its rules inconsistent and certainly unknowable. It didn’t matter. All that concerned me was the story that Mer’esan so desperately wanted to tell—the story that had been locked inside her for centuries.
We sat across the table from each other. She shuffled the deck and dealt each of us thirteen cards, face up, laid out across two rows. Somehow every one of her cards featured scenes with figures bearing seven-pointed stars. Whether through guile or magic, she had given herself the entire suit of spells—the suit of the Jan’Tep.
I looked down at my cards. Each of the figures painted on their surface carried or wore a number of black leaves. So I’m to play the Mahdek.
Mer’esan fanned out the rest of the deck into three circles. The largest she placed at the centre of the table between us, face down so that the backs of the cards showed. “The oasis,” she said, then laid down two smaller circles of cards, one on the right and the other on the left.
It took me a moment to figure out what they represented. “Duelling circles?”
She nodded and placed one of her cards inside her circle, face up, showing a young woman with outstretched hands above which floated seven septagrams. “Your turn,” she said.
I was about to reach for one of my cards when I suddenly understood what this was. “You’re … enacting the duels from the final war between the Jan’Tep and the Mahdek. But why?”
“It is only a game,” she replied. “Now make your choice.”
The last war had taken place nearly three centuries ago, when Mer’esan would have been a young woman. We had nearly been wiped out in that conflict. The Mahdek had used the magic of shadow—of the void—to unleash demons, attacking Jan’Tep children in their sleep so as to distract even our most powerful mages. My ancestors had fought back, drawing on the other six fundamental forms of magic: iron and ember, sand and silk, breath and blood.
Not knowing the rules, I made the simplest choice I could. I selected one of my cards. It was named “The Warden of Leaves” and showed an archer shooting eight arrows into the air, the fletching of each one made from a black leaf. I placed it inside my circle.
“Wrong!” Mer’esan declared, and took my card away.
“I don’t understand. My card was an eight of leaves and yours only a seven of spells. Shouldn’t mine—”
“This card cannot defend itself,” she said. “It is in grief.”
“In grief? What does that mean?”
She pointed to the two rows of cards laid out in front of me. Two of them had somehow ended up face down. “Those cards are taken. They bind your warden of leaves in grief.”
I looked under the two cards. They were both low numbers, a two and a three. Each of them depicted a child.
“Now choose your next attacker,” Mer’esan commanded.
Confused and shaken, I placed another face card, this one was a nine—the shaman of leaves.
“No!” Mer’esan said, and took that one away too.
“Let me guess, it’s ‘in grief’ too?”
Her eyes blazed angrily. “Yes.”
I glanced back down at my remaining cards and saw another had been flipped over without my noticing, this one a five. “This is wrong,” I said, finally understanding her intent. “The Mahdek attacked our families, not the other way around. They were the ones who—”
“Play the game!”
Frustrated, I took three of my cards at once, including the highest numbered card, the speaker of leaves, and placed them in my circle.
“Grief.” Mer’esan ripped the card from the circle and tossed it into a growing discard pile next to her. She grabbed the second and the third. “Grief and more grief. You cannot win this way.”
My circle was empty again. Moreover, almost all the cards on my side of the table had somehow been flipped over, like rows of corpses strewn across a battlefield. “This isn’t what happened! The Jan’Tep duelled the Mahdek demon summoners, not their children.” I rose from my seat. “Why are you lying to me?”
Mer’esan wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Sit down,” she said. “The game isn’t done yet.”
“Then what is my move?” I demanded. “Every time I try to play a card you tell me it can’t fight back!”
“You have no cards left to play,” she replied. “All you can do now is watch.”
Reluctantly I took my seat. Mer’esan placed one of her cards, the clan prince of spells, inside the oasis. Her hands were shaking, and I couldn’t tell if this was because she was fighting the mind chain or from some deeper agony that came with the memories.
She reached a fingernail under one of the cards making up the fanned-out circle of the oasis and turned it over, sending all the other cards flipping over in sequence until at last they were all face up. Every one of them was a septagram. The oasis had been taken by the Jan’Tep. “You are defeated,” she said.
“I don’t understand. What spell did the clan prince cast?”
“The only spell that matters. The one that lets you win the game.”
I followed her gaze to the Mahdek cards laid out in front of me. They were all face up as well. Each of the leaves depicting their suit was now blood red in colour.
“This makes no sense,” I insisted. It makes perfect sense. You just don’t want to believe it. My people lived in beautiful cities, but had no great architects. Our magic came from the oases in the centre of those cities, yet we did not have the means to create new ones. Always we told ourselves it was our great ancestors who had devised these things for us and that our duty was to protect them from being taken away by our enemies.
But the Mahdek had never tried to take the oasis from us.
We had stolen it from them.
They hadn’t launched a war between our peoples.
We had simply massacred them in their sleep, beginning with their families, their children.
We had looted their future for ourselves.
“How could this happen?” I asked.
Mer’esan, tears streaming down her face, turned one of the cards in the circle back over, sending the others flipping face down again. The pattern on the back of the cards was gone, replaced by solid black, the colour of shadow. There was only one kind of spell that called on the power of the void.
“That’s not possible,” I said. “The Mahdek were demon summoners, our people would never—”
A sob escaped Mer’esan’s lips, the last links of the mind chain slowly breaking apart. “Do you propose to tell me the rules of the game?”
I looked at the cards representing the ancestors I had venerated my whole life, the ancestors whom I now knew had summoned horrors with which to murder the children of our enemies, in order to weaken their mages. “Then … that’s how the war ended? Through assassination and dark magic?”
“Ended?” She picked up the cards from the oasis and held them in her hand. “No, Kellen of the House of Ke. Once a game like this has begun, it is never ended.” She placed the cards face up on the table, one on top of the other, with increasing speed. The illustrations went by so fast that I had trouble making out which cards they represented, but I thought I saw something …
“Stop!” I said. “I can’t see what’s happening.”
“You never can,” she said, stopping at last as she placed one final card on top of the stack.
A young man stood surrounded by six books, each one displaying a septagram. The card was called “The Initiate of Spells,” and I had seen it before, both when Ferius had shown me her deck and when Mer’esan had played it during the game. Only now something had changed.
The figure facing us bore the same studious expression as before, but now I saw black markings twisting around one of his eyes. Just like mine.
“This can’t be … What are you telling me, Mer’esan?”
She flipped over the card so that it was face down. The back had returned to the unremarkable pattern I’d seen before. “I have said nothing, son of Ke. We are merely playing at cards.”
My fingers trembled as they rose up to meet the cold skin around my left eye. “The shadowblack … When our ancestors found they didn’t have the power to defeat the Mahdek, they … we … called forth demons to destroy them. First we attacked their families to break their spirits, then we killed their mages.”
Mer’esan’s expression was flat, though the tears still flowed down her cheeks. “That would be a sound strategy, if you were trying to win the game at all costs.”
“But that’s just it … the cost … The Mahdek didn’t curse us with the shadowblack; we infected ourselves when we used the magic of the void to summon demons.”
Mer’esan let out a long, deep breath that sounded like a sigh and wiped the tears from her eyes. The mind chain was broken. “History is written by the victors,” she said, “but the truth has a way of revealing itself.”
I heard a low growl and looked down to see Reichis’s mother glaring up at the dowager.
“What did she say?” I asked Reichis.
It was Mer’esan who answered. “She says that it is not in the proper way of things that a parent should let their child suffer for crimes they had no part in.”
I felt something hard and cold in my stomach. “Tell her she doesn’t understand the Jan’Tep then.”
Slowly and carefully, Mer’esan picked up the cards from the table and handed them to me. “Every society has atrocities in its past, Kellen. Do you think the Daroman empire was built on nothing but courage and military brilliance? Or that the Berabesq viziers worship their six-faced god with nothing more than prayers and celebrations?”
“How can you be so calm?” I demanded. “Your own husband cast the spell that kept you from revealing what he and the others had done in the name of our people!”
“He wasn’t an evil man,” she said. “He looked at what lay ahead for our people—from the Daroman empire reaching out from the east to the Berabesq in the south who would happily commit genocide against us for what they saw as our devil magic. To survive we needed to strengthen our spells and train more young mages than ever before. The Mahdek knew the secrets of creating the oases within their cities, making their spells more powerful and enabling their young to learn the ways of magic more easily.”
“Would the Mahdek have destroyed us?”
“It didn’t matter. We couldn’t take the chance. We had to take the oasis in this city from them, as we had to take all the others.” She rose from her chair and walked away from me. “Those are the rules of the game, Kellen.”
“Wait … Where are you going?”
She stopped, just for a moment, her hand on the door. “The chains that have bound me for almost three hundred years are gone. I think I would like to go outside now.”
When I joined Mer’esan in the cool night air she was staring into the darkness blanketing the gardens. I wondered how long ago they’d been planted here, and who tended them, and whether the dowager magus had ever even seen them up close before. None of these questions though were the ones that mattered.
Just past the gardens, the great palace stood proudly before us. The seat of our clan’s governance. A place we hadn’t even built ourselves. “Did we create nothing of our own?” I asked.
Mer’esan gave a small, bitter laugh. “Of course we did. The Mahdek were always few in number. This city, for example, is far too small to house our entire clan. So we built—”
“The slums,” I said. “The Sha’Tep slums.” Ill-made structures of rough wood and unshaped sandstone. “Three hundred years, and all we made ourselves were hovels.”
“Our people never set out to be architects or builders, Kellen. Magic is our vocation, the one endeavour we prize above all others.”
I thought about the illness that had overtaken some of the other initiates, and of Shalla. “I have to find my sister,” I said. “Someone is trying to hurt our people the same way we hurt the Mahdek. They’re destroying children so that—”
Mer’esan cut me off. “Is that what they’re doing? Destroying children?”
I wished for once that she wouldn’t turn everything into an enigmatic question, but then I realised I already knew the answer. When the men in Mahdek masks had attacked us the night we were trying to summon familiars, they hadn’t attempted to kill Shalla, they’d tried to make her bond with a sick animal. They had simply tried to permanently weaken her magic. Which is exactly what’s happening to the other initiates.
“Who would want our people to survive, but to lessen our magic?” I asked.
Mer’esan shrugged. “A reasonable question, but not the right one.”
I closed my eyes, trying to envision all the pieces of the puzzle, arranging them in my mind the way I would the complex geometries of a spell. “You said before the war, we didn’t have as many Jan’Tep mages as we do now, and they weren’t as powerful as the ones today.”
“Yeah,” Reichis said, giving a snort. “We call those ‘the good old days.’”
I’d got so used to not thinking of him as a nekhek that I’d forgotten that the squirrel cats saw us as enemies.
“Hey, don’t look at me,” he said, catching my stare. “If my people were after yours we’d just sneak into your rooms at night and rip out your—”
“Eyeballs. Yes, I get it.”
Mer’esan tapped me on the forehead. “Focus.”
“So the real question is, who has the most to gain by our mages being weaker?” No, that’s still not it. This was just like casting a spell—you had to get every element exactly right for it to work.
All of a sudden, I had it. “Who suffers most when those with magic become too powerful?”
Mer’esan smiled. “Good. Clever. Now that you have the question, I believe you also have the answer.”
I did too. How many times had I sat in my room, panicking over what would happen if I couldn’t spark my bands … getting more and more resentful every time Shalla or one of the others became more powerful? Because I knew they’d lord it over me that much more, laugh at me, expect me to be their servant. Because that’s what you do to people who don’t have magic of their own.
“Those who suffer most when magic becomes too powerful are those without it,” I said. “The Sha’Tep are the ones attacking us.”
Mer’esan nodded. “As our magic grows, the gap between us becomes wider and wider. Every generation the Sha’Tep become more like slaves.”
“What’s a slave?” asked Reichis. The other squirrel cat chittered at him, and after a few moments he looked up at me. “Humans are disgusting.”
“Go,” Mer’esan said. “If we are correct and the conspirators are Sha’Tep, then they will have taken your sister and the Argosi to the place that gives us our magic but where we ourselves cannot tread.”
“The oasis? But we go there all the time. It’s where we learn to work our magic in the first place!”
“Is it the wellspring, or merely the fountain?”
“Stop testing me!” I said. “My sister and my friend are in danger!” I looked down at the bands on my forearms, wishing I’d broken the silk band that might let me perform scrying spells before my parents had counter-banded it. Only Mother said she’d already tried to find Shalla that way and couldn’t. The wellspring or the fountain …“The mines … You’re talking about the mines. The oasis is the source, but it’s the ore from the mines that lets us create the inks for our bands.”
“So what?” Reichis asked.
“Mages can’t enter the mines without getting sick from the raw ore. That’s why the Sha’Tep have to extract it for us so that we can be banded with the six fundamental magics.”
Mer’esan reached out a finger and touched the top of my cheek just below my left eye. The sensation felt odd … like the vibration in the air when lightning is in the sky. “Seven. There are seven magics, Kellen.”
In all the excitement of helping the dowager magus break the mind chain, and in the revelation of what my ancestors had done to the Mahdek, I had managed to forget the shadowblack that banded my eye and marked me forever, placed there by my own grandmother. “Why did she do this to me?”
“Who can say? Perhaps it was madness, perhaps the disease had eaten away at her mind.”
The words came out before I could stop myself. “I’m glad my father killed her. She deserved to die.”
Mer’esan withdrew her hand. “The Seren’tia I knew was a wise woman, a mage of great skill and subtlety.”
“Until she went insane.”
The dowager magus looked at me, her expression not so much disapproving as … sad. “We must make a choice, you and I. We must decide whether to hate the madwoman who tried to destroy you, or whether to believe that some part of your grandmother’s soul remained, and perhaps she understood something that we do not. Magic is neither good nor evil; it is how we use it that dictates its purpose.”
“What purpose then? Why would my grandmother want me to have the shadowblack?”
“Only time will tell, and only if you survive long enough to walk the path before you.” She turned away from us and started walking deeper into the garden. “My path leads me elsewhere.”
“Wait!” I called out. “We have to stop the Sha’Tep conspirators! You have to help me—”
She paused, just for a moment. “I have given three hundred years to our people, Kellen, most of those spent bound in a spell cast by the man I loved, and who loved me. I have been chained by magic, and now I am sick of it, and of the past. The future belongs to you and to your generation. Only one task remains to me now.”
“What?” I demanded. “What could possibly be more important than the future of our people?”
“I want to go for a walk in my garden,” she said, and began walking towards the wide beds of flowers and vines, her hands outstretched, reaching for them. With every step, the spells shimmering beneath her silken garments flickered. Soon they began to fade, and the skin beneath the cloth, and the muscles and bones beneath the skin, crumbled in on themselves. Before she’d touched a single petal, the dowager magus had become dust.